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Bread Pudding
One quart sweet milk, quart bread-crumbs, four eggs, four tablespoons sugar; soak bread in half the milk until soft; mash fine, add the rest of milk, the well-beaten eggs and sugar, and a teacup raisins; bake one hour, serve warm with warm sauce or maple sugar hard sauce; or, slice, butter, and spread bread with preserves or jelly, place nicely in a baking-dish. Make a custard of one pint of sweet milk, three eggs, and sugar to taste, and while boiling pour it over bread. Place in oven and bake till brown, eat with or without sauce.
Two puddings in one entry: a plain baked custard pudding of soaked crumbs, and a layered version using buttered slices and jam. Both are custards, so the oven matters more than the mixing.
- Sweet milkThis means fresh unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk that many recipes in this book call for. Use whole milk; skim gives a thin, weeping custard.
- Teacup of raisinsA teacup in period recipes generally runs smaller than a modern cup; reckon on about 3/4 cup, roughly 4 oz. Raisins of the period usually came with seeds, which the cook removed; dark seedless raisins are the closest substitute.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because wood- and coal-fired ranges had no thermostat or reliable gauge. Bake at 325 to 350F. Above that the eggs curdle at the edges before the middle sets.
- The hinge: set, don't boilA quart of milk to four eggs is a soft custard. Pull it when the center is just barely wobbly and a knife an inch from the middle comes out clean, around 175 to 180F. A water bath is worth the trouble if your oven runs hot.
- "While boiling pour it over bread"Take this as scalding, not a rolling boil. Heat the pint of milk to steaming, then temper it into the beaten eggs and sugar off the heat; if the mixture actually boils the eggs scramble and the custard breaks.
- Bread-crumbsNineteenth-century crumbs meant torn or grated stale bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters today. A quart is about 4 to 5 oz of torn day-old white bread; packaged dry crumbs will absorb far more milk and turn pasty.
- Sugar to tasteThe first pudding's four tablespoons is restrained by modern palates — it relies on the sauce or the raisins. For the layered version, 3 to 4 tablespoons per pint of milk keeps it in balance with the jam.
- Yield and timingThe crumb pudding fills about a 2-quart dish and serves six to eight; the sliced version's quantities of bread and preserves are left to the cook. The stated hour is about right for the crumb pudding at 325 to 350F; the sliced version, being shallower, will brown sooner -- the recipe simply says bake till brown.
Bread pudding earned its place in a book like Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (a work whose roots are in Marysville, Ohio, hence "Buckeye," and which circulated in an 1877 Minneapolis imprint and was reissued repeatedly through the 1880s, though earlier and closely related Ohio issues are recorded) for reasons of thrift rather than fashion: a household baking its own bread produced stale ends and crusts every week, and a quart of crumbs, a quart of milk and four eggs turned them into a company dessert. The layered second method — buttered slices spread with preserves or jelly and flooded with custard — is the same idea that English cookery calls bread-and-butter pudding, and it appears in American manuals throughout the century with only small variations. The suggested maple sugar hard sauce is the regional note; maple was the cheap sweetener across the upper Midwest and New England, and hard sauce, being creamed butter and sugar, cost nothing to keep in a cold pantry.